‘PEOPLE ASK if I’m like my characters: slightly goofy, a bit seat-of-the-pants. Maybe – but I prefer to think of that as a good thing. I’m relaxed about spontaneity, let’s say.

I’ve always gone off on adventures, and I always travel light. I did that in Hong Kong, on my big Chinese trip 10 years ago. I went by rail right down the coast from Beijing, searching for the place where my grandparents met before the war. I’d wash my smalls on the train each night and put them out in the carriage with clothes pegs. Great way to bond with the locals.

I’m a complete Chinaphile, and Beijing is my second favourite city in the world, after London. Both of them are spider webs, gothic in personality: you ramble all over, never quite knowing what will turn up next. I wandered from Tiananmen Square to the Forbidden City at daybreak, and sneaked in all alone. The sheer scale of that place, the weight of 7,000 years of civilisation, is mind-bending – way beyond the sophistication of anything we’ve created in the West.

It’s a very safe country to get lost in. In Shanghai, I went looking for somewhere to stay – the authorities want you to pay £50 a night for a tourist hotel, but I knew you could get a “local” place for a fiver. I ended up in this tiny alleyway, lost in the dark, and a girl and her father jumped out of a house and insisted on escorting me back to the city centre. We walked miles together, with the little girl translating. Next day, I took them a cake to say thanks.

I think my wanderlust comes from my childhood in Brighton. Mum was a 1970s boho, and we took in foreign students and jazz musicians. I’d sit watching Top of the Pops with Mohammed from Afghanistan and Faroukh from Turkey. I often wonder what happened to those people.

It’s harder to holiday impulsively now, with a family, but Adam is pretty intrepid too, so we don’t let it stop us. When Gabriel, our oldest, was two, we went to Goa. I get fed up when snooty types say it’s not the real India. Why not? Because it’s got decent roads? Get over it.

Anyway, we heard the Hindu pilgrimage of Kumbh Mela was happening in Allahabad, and decided we had to see it. We hired a car and set off into the night, 16 hours across Uttar Pradesh, stopping at Agra for the Taj Mahal.

It was the first mela of the millennium. We hired one of the Bedouin-style tents they set up for tourists, and woke in the middle of this epic spectacle: thousands of people, total sensory overload. I was literally and emotionally swept along by it – the feeling of warmth and love is so overwhelming. We ended up on a barge, surrounded by candles and flowers, being submerged head to toe in the holy river. We had to take turns, of course, because Gabriel was on the bank, looking a bit confused.

Our holiday hunches don’t always work out. When our daughter Bea was tiny, we decided to combine a wedding in Italy with visiting friends in Montenegro – and to do the whole lot by road. So that’s two weeks, driving across the Alps, with a four-year-old and a breast-feeding baby. Harrowing doesn’t begin to describe it.

We’ve three children now, so I’m trying to cure myself of these mad trips and settle for a weekend in the tent at Womad, or on the Isle of Wight. I like the Isle of Wight: you have to catch the ferry, so it feels like a proper holiday – not to a different country, to a different century. This summer was Ventnor: very nostalgic, with sand castles and the pier.

It’s no good, though: my wanderlust is kicking in again. We’re planning Australia next – I can’t wait to see Uluru, and decide if it got there as a meteor or by some kind of magic.

And maybe, in a few years’ time, as an empty-nester, I’ll go off and make a fool of myself in Ibiza. I love dancing – I still sometimes sneak off to the End, in Bloomsbury, on Wednesday nights for a bit of drum’n’bass. My dance moves are a little “experimental”, but I like to think I’ll have more decorum when I’m 50. Within five minutes of getting to Ibiza, though, I’d probably be topless in the pool, me and my whistle ...’